For some people, Christmas goes out the door with the wrapping paper on Christmas morning. For some, the spirit moves out immediately after Christmas dinner, when the tree gets stripped and tossed out onto the curb. For lots of people, the spirit goes away when the alarm goes off on the next workday. For a bunch of folks, it extends through New Year's and all of the countdown parties. For the Three Wise Men, it most likely made it all the way to Epiphany.
For me, it kind of changes from year to year. There are some years when I want to leave the tree up until late January. There are some years when I'm ready to take it down as soon as we wrap up the final event where we want people to see our house looking festive (so far, that has never happened before December 25th, at least). I'm never really sure what triggers it in me, or why it changes depending on the year, but there definitely is a point where I'm ready to have everything back in boxes and done.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all - if it was Christmas every day, then it wouldn't be special. (Just ask the gang on Sesame Street - they had a problem with this a few years back.)
But, no matter who you are, you probably have a point where you're ready for the house to no longer be red and green (and gold and silver and covered in sparkly lights).
For me, this year, I experienced it at about 11am this morning.
My parents (who live in South Dakota) had been in town for a while prior to Christmas, then they had flown from Minneapolis to LA for Christmas with my siblings and their families. They got back in town late yesterday, and spent one more night with us. Christopher barely saw them (he stayed up and welcomed them last night, but his alarm goes off at 5am so there was no sitting up and chatting), but I got to see them for a while this morning. We looked at their Christmas pictures and talked about the great time they had in LA. And we discussed what Christopher and I have been up to in the past couple of weeks.
The house looks great - decorated, and with Christmas cards all over the living room - and we've got leftover Christmas cookies (and candy... and ham...) which will take us a while to get through all of. We've got fresh flowers that are still gorgeous from last week, and there's egg nog in the fridge. And we have something holiday-related going on every night through Saturday. And getting to sit back and enjoy it all again last night and this morning was great.
But as I stood in the kitchen eating a Christmas cookie, washing a couple of dishes, and watching Mom and Dad drive away toward South Dakota this morning, I kind of felt the urge to take down the tree and box it all up for next year.
Maybe I'd feel differently if we had snow so that it felt like December instead of March. Or maybe this is just one of the "early take-down" years. Or maybe I just need to finish the egg nog and watch another movie.
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